Tag Archives: banks

Up to 2 months ago I had never checked my credit report, there was no need to. Well, actually, I feared it. With all my financial issues I knew the report would be bad. When I finally checked it, it was FAIR, which was an absolute result. So, I signed up for alerts which has turned out to be a real blessing.

I got an alert saying that my credit score had dropped by 12 points, confused I logged on. In the alerts was a ‘late payment’ to one of my creditors. I knew who it would be immediately.

Long standing readers of this blog may remember that I have 3 of my bigger loans on a debt management repayment plan, this was done to maintain payments with the interest freed. It has been in place for 10 months now and helped enormously, but only one of those creditors has ever caused issues. Bank A as we will call them phone me every 2 months to say the payment is late, I then dispute it, they re-check and low and behold I am up to date. What happens then is, with Bank A they have to transfer the money internally from the debt management account to my loan account. This delay is then sometimes marked as non payment till they manually correct it.

What I didn’t know was they then INCORRECTLY marked me down as late payment, not missed payment, late payment. Even though the late payment is caused internally. I phoned Bank A and they didn’t know why the credit people had been informed by themselves either. I was then transferred to the department that deals with the ‘debtor accounts’.

The net result is that it is an error but I have to write in and lodge a formal complaint with evidence to get the credit score corrected. When I checked my history, Bank A have lodged FOUR (YES FOUR) incorrect late payment scores. Thanks so very much!

So, this will be resolved but it does highlight something I was guilty of. I buried my head in the sand a lot, not just with avoiding the mail and checking my bank balance but things like this. Not that is has held me back as I haven’t applied for any credit.

It also shows that sometimes people do make mistakes, and they can be costly. I am hoping this is corrected quickly, I can’t be bothered with another long drawn out appeal for something that isn’t my fault!